Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in 1882 January
25th in London, she as a novelist and essayist was regarded as one of
the foremost central figures of the modernist literary movement in the 20th
century. Educated by her parents namely Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep
Jackson, Virginia grew up in a literate and well connected household. Being
a daughter to Sir Leslie who was a respective editor, critic and biographer
himself, Virginia grew up in an environment where influences of Victorian
literary society were ‘brimful’.
[mh2]Such
influences were complemented by an enormous library in their Kensington home
where Virginia was taught the classics and English literature. Virginia, unlike
her brothers who were formally educated, she was educated at home as the
Victorian society dictated.

Virginia was 13 then when her mother died in
1895, and exacerbated by the death of her half-sister Stella two years later,
the incidents led to the writer’s several nervous breakdown. According to modern
scholars, Virginia’s breakdown and the eventual chronic depression were made
worse by sexual abuse she experienced through one of her half-brothers[mh3].
Posthumously, it was claimed that Virginia suffered bipolar disorder that deeply
impacted her social functioning leading to drastic mood swings. Though such
disorder was argued to be disturbing Virginia’s work, relationships and life,
most feminists claimed that her literary abilities remained intact and that the
experience added enthusiasm into her writing.[1]

The death of her father in 1904 and the second
serious nervous breakdown called for the three siblings Virginia, Vanessa and
Adrian to sell 22 Hyde Park Gate and buy the house at 46 Gordon Square in
Bloomsbury. Pursuing her studies in King’s College London, Virginia met with
Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Duncan Grant and Leonard Woolf.
Together they formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle called the
Bloomsbury Group. Starting as a social clique, the group influenced literature,
aesthetics, criticism and economics as well as modern attitudes toward feminism,
pacifism and sexuality in a profound manner. As controversial a group that
is, Bloomsbury Group reached fame in 1910 when the group pulled the Dreadnought
trick.
[mh4]

The Bloomsbury Group participated in a hoax contrived by
Horace de Vere Cole in 1910. Dressed in Abyssinian royalty garb, Cole and five
of his friends including Virginia disguised themselves with skin darkeners and
turbans. On February 10th, Cole, through an accomplice, send a
telegram to HMS Dreadnought moored in Weymouth, Morset stating that a group of
princes from Abyssinia will pay a visit. The telegram was purportedly signed by
Sir Charles Hardinge, Foreign Office Under-Secretary. Cole’s group went to
Paddington station where Cole pretended to be Herbert Cholmondeley of UK Foreign
Office. Through a special train and a VIP coach arranged by the stationmaster,
they journeyed to Weymouth where they were welcomed with an honour guard. The
ruse was just revealed after Cole and his associates send a letter and a group
photo to the Daily Mirror, a British tabloid daily newspaper.[2]

In 1912, Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a Jewish-born,
British political theorist, author, publisher and civil servant. Elected to the
Cambridge Apostles, Leonard formed one of the legs of Bloomsbury Group. As a
couple, Virginia and Leonard shared a passion in writing and subsequently
resulting to founding the Hogarth Press which published most of Virginia’s work
in 1917.[3]
Since Bloomsbury discouraged sexual exclusivity, in 1922 she had an affair with
Vita Sackville-West; a relationship that lasted throughout the 1920s. Virginia felt victim to manic
depression after completing the manuscript of her last novel Between the Acts
making possible the self-contemplated suicide.
Virginia drowned herself through weighing her pockets with stones into the
River Ouse near her home on March 28, 1941 and her body was not found until
14th of April.[4]

When Virginia was unable to work due to
bipolar disorder, Woolf had gone on to publish novels and essays through Hogarth
Press that elevated the public intellect. Virginia’s novels and essays are both
critically and popularly accepted.
[mh5]Recognized as one of the greatest novelists,
Virginia was considered to be one of the greatest innovators in the English
language experimenting with stream-of-consciousness (so James Joyce) which
attempted at portraying individual points of view through giving the written
equivalent of the character’s thought processes. Virginia as well powerfully
depicted the underlying psychological and emotional motives of the characters.[5]

Throughout the course of Virginia’s writing
there are three novels that reveal the poetic visioning of the author that
honors ordinary, banal settings in the light of warfare despite the mental
illness that include Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927)
and The Waves (1931) which will be the basis of this research. Novels
that we considered to be the most appropriate to do so.

Published in May 14, 1925, Mrs. Dalloway
details the daily experiences of Clarissa Dalloway as represented in post-World
War 1 England. Embedded on Clarissa’s preparation for a party as a hostess, the
novel was taken with an interior perspective. As the story travels forward and
backwards in time, the author presented the character’s mind explicitly making
possible the structure of the life imagery of Clarissa and of the inter-war
social framework. How the main character interprets the thought and actions of
others and relates her experiences on two separate occasions is said to be a
popular example of stream-of-consciousness storytelling wherein scenarios are
deeply integrated on the momentary thoughts of a particular character.

There are four themes evident in Mrs Dalloway:
feminism, homosexuality, mental illness and existential issues. There are two
characters that are Clarissa and Sally Seton that hailed the women and
femininity. The two women embody strong attraction to each other with Clarissa
considering the kiss that they shared to be the happiest moment of her life. In
addition, there are also gay characters in the novel in the persona of Septimus
Smith and Doris Kilman. Septimus, further, possesses hallucinations while also
criticizing insanity and depression treatment. Death as an act of embracing life
is said to be a clear parody illustrated in the novel.[6]

Preceded by Mrs Dalloway is the To the Lighthouse
Novel which was published in May 5, 1927. Centering on the Ramsay family,
this novel is a free-flowing, multiple discursive tale that details the family’s
visit to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between the periods of 1910 and 1920. In
essence though the novel includes minimal dialogue and almost no action as it is
written as thoughts and observations. To the Lighthouse is an
illustration of the power of childhood emotions while stressing the impermanence
of adult relationships. Ubiquity of transience and complexity of experiences are
just two of the major themes of the novel. As such, majority of the contents
of the novel do not direct objects of vision but rather meaning of perceptions.[7]
[mh6]This
means that the writer focused more on how the characters interprets what they
feel and what they think instead of digging deeper on plainly what they feel and
think.

An American literary critic and feminist, Elaine Showalter
has written extensively on the descriptive life of Virginia Woolf in her books
which will in essence guide this research. Showalter’s first book entitled A
Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing is a
study of British women novelists. Showalter described the female literary
tradition in the English novel and the social backgrounds of the women who
composed it. Chapter 10 of the novel under the title of ‘Virginia Woolf and the
Flight into Androgyny’ is devoted to the literary genius of Virginia
notwithstanding the manic depression.[8]

In her third provocative and illuminating book,
Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media, Showalter maps the
persistence of a cultural phenomenon whereby the most triumphant of the
therapeutic societies have not been able to prevent the appearance of hysterical
disorders, imaginary illnesses, rumor panics, and pseudomemories that mark the
end of the millennium. The author also highlights the order of contemporary
syndromes and draws connections to earlier times and settings, showing that
hysterias mutate and are renamed; and that under the right circumstances,
everyone is susceptible. As she demonstrates, hysterias are always with us, a
kind of collective coping mechanism for changing times; all that differs are
names and labels, and at times of crisis, individual hysterias can become
contagious.

Realizing the fact that Virginia Woolf wrote most of her
stories in a psychological-oriented manner, there are specific theories as to
delineate that of Virginia’s experiences. The research considers three theories:
1) theories of the unconscious mind and the defense mechanism of repression; 2)
theory of emotion consequences for the philosophy of aesthetics and 3) theory of
natural selection that explains the diversification in nature. The first theory
is developed by Sigmund Freud in between 1856 and 1939. Freud claimed that there
are influences from other parts of the mind including unconsciousness as a
personal habit, being unaware and intuition. Defense mechanism in Freudian
psychoanalytic theory refers to the psychological strategies that were brought
into play via different entities that purports on coping with reality and
maintaining self-image. Such strategies act in such a way to exclude desires and
impulses from a person’s consciousness; for this reason it was called
psychological repression.[10]

William James, a pioneering American psychologist and
philosopher, came out with the theory of emotion together with Carl Lange. Such
theory states that human beings responded to experiences in the world with
automatic nervous system that creates physiological events. Examples of these
events are muscular tension, heart pulse, perspiration and mouth dryness. James
and Lange continue that emotions spring as results of these physiological
changes rather than causes.[11]
James developed the Mind-Word Connection (stream of consciousness) which was a
significant impact on avant-garde and modernist literature and art.

Lastly, the theory developed by Charles Darwin that
explains the analogy to artificial selection. His work is on the idea that human
processes favor heritable traits which became more common in successive
generations and unfavorable heritable traits become less common. Mainly
demonstrating ‘the struggle for existence’, Darwin justifies consistently,
heroism and social utility as accomplished by human. Such theory extends its
application on how human behave especially in terms of adherence to cultural
norms and social structures such as incest avoidance and gender roles.[12]

The main objective of this research is to
disclose the Woolf unknown to many based on the connection among science,
psychology and literature as deduced from Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the
Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931) novels. In particular, the
research will seek to accomplish the following specific objectives:

1)To conduct an in-depth biographical
research of Woolf’s work experimentation

2)To distinguish the interconnection of
Woolf’s novels with modernism, postmodernism and feminism

3)To integrate the works of three
theorists namely Sigmund Freud, William James and Charles Robert Darwin

4)To explore how science and psychology
were exposed in her works through the technique of stream of consciousness, the
madness of the person, her character and the language she conceived herself

5)To comprehend the train of thoughts of
Virginia when it comes to integrating science and psychology in her works

6)To understand the writer’s life
experiences based on situations portrayed in the novels

The first three objectives will be attained
through literature review including the reading of the three novels and the last
three objectives will be attained after comprehending all the chapters within
the three novels in a manner of qualitative empirical researching.

5.
Research Questions

There are three sets of key questions that the
research will attempt to answer. These are:

2)How do the three novels connect with the
concepts of modernism, postmodernism and feminism in literature? How they could
likely to dictate how Virginia incorporated her psyche with her writing?

3)How the three theorists Freud, James and
Darwin explain the literary consciousness of Virginia? What do these theorists
reveal about Virginia’s expressiveness?

6.
Research Methodology

There are two basic concepts that the research will be based
upon. First is the biographical research whereby we will reflect on a rapid
expansion of interest in the study of Virginia Woolf’s life within the context
of her three novels mentioned earlier for the purpose of exploring how Virginia
as a writer interpret experiences and social relationships. According to
Gabriele Rosenthal, biographical researchers are motivated by realization of the
necessity of “getting inside of the actor’s perspective” as an advantage for
recording subjective perspectives of members of various milieu.[13]
Such research will construct Virginia’s scientific, psychological and literary
proclivity; therefore, interpretative biographical research in nature.

Second is the qualitative empirical research which “typically
starts with some a priori theory and which the researcher develops to try to
explain and/or predict what happens in the real world.” Though the main purpose
of the research is to test theory and possibly refine it, this research will
build on insights from three specific theories in order to demonstrate the
literary and psychosomatic journey of Virginia Woolf. Qualitative because the
researcher primarily purports on exploring Woolf’s experiences as demonstrated
in her writings. As qualitative also, “the researcher could arrived at a more
subjective analysis though it relies heavily on the researcher’s knowledge and
experience to identify patterns, extract themes and make generalizations.”[14]

BORDOGNA,
Francesca, 2007. Inner division and uncertain contours: William James and the
politics of the modern self. British Society for the History of Science:
BJHS 40(4): 505–536, (December).

Bullard,
Alice, 2001. The Truth in Madness. South Atlantic Review, Vol. 66, No. 2,
Being Global: From the Enlightenment to the Age of Information. South Atlantic
Modern Language Association. (Spring, 2001), pp. 114-132.

Leach,
Laurie F., 1990. "The Difficult Business of Intimacy": Friendship and Writing
in Virginia Woolf's "The Waves". South Central Review. The Johns Hopkins
University Press on behalf of The South Central Modern Language Association.
Vol. 7, No. 4, (Winter, 1990), pp. 53-66.